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Do non physical things exist?

arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Yes. He's an idealist, but also a mind-body dualist, and doesn't see the problems with that. His favourite philosophical notion is an expression of phenomena versus noumena, or the full Kantian ding an sich that is trivially true, but that some navel-gazers have elevated to almost mythical status.

The observation of x is not x.

It's a nod to the important notion that all our perceptions are internally generated, but the wibblers have taken it to be some deep statement about the 'ultimate™' nature of reality, rather than a simple caveat to be careful of our biases.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
hackenslash said:
James is the ultimate armchair philosophy expert who can't even manage to formulate his own favourite philosophical notion without mangling it into incoherence, despite it having been corrected and re-corrected a bazillion times (at least as many times as I've been warned about exaggerating). We've (the royal we here, referring to a lot of extremely knowledgeable people) been working on him for well over a decade, and progress is measured on the Planck scale.
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Unfortunately mate, your brief spell away has seen a gargantuan degree of recidivism on his part.

He is now, as far as all his posts go, the fucking Messiah. You can't have a discussion with jamest, his ego keeps butting in.

When you want to spend 20 minutes groaning, go check out his post to Rationalia's Technical Stuff / Site Suggestions forum... I can't post a link as it requires a log in. He tells them they need a serious Philosophy forum so that serious philosophers like him can hold court, and that he'd bring in so many customers that they would probably be glad to pay him for his contributions. You can guess how that went down at Rationalia, and then you can also probably guess how jamest responded to that: yes, he called them all stupid cunts incapable of understanding his brilliance.

Or just look at his recent posting on ratskep... they veer wildly between calling people stupid cunts and ranting about how he's just there to help the mere peons.

Remember how he was a 'serious' philosopher before?

Well, now he's a 'serious' economist, and really gets his pants in a bunch if you don't accord him the respect he believes he deserves due to this expertise he magically acquired by buying some bitcoin.

He's one of the most extreme examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect I've ever had the misfortune to encounter.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
hackenslash said:
The observation of x is not x.
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It's amazing how perplexing and intellect-shattering idealists find this.

Yep, the map is not the terrain... but of course the map relates to the terrain and anyone can use the map to navigate the terrain - there's a real world correspondence that's imminently testable. The map supervenes on the terrain, not the other way round - good luck finding an idealist who can grasp that.
 
arg-fallbackName="Led Zeppelin"/>
hackenslash said:
It's hard to know where to start after this. This is suggestive of a very Pornhub view of what love is, and you want to delve straight into ontology?

Let me ask you, would you risk your life for a blowjob? Do you even realise that this is the implicit comparison you've made?
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I don't know. I was in prison for a short time and I met people who told me they would jump over a pit of live alligators to get some pussy. I believed them. But I guess I really don't know what to think about it. Pitfall-Tout_A-1.jpg
 
arg-fallbackName="Led Zeppelin"/>
Im sorry if this sounds dumb. I guess I just really dont have anything else to offer than what I have already said. Even though I still strongly suspect that God does exist, I would be trolling if I were to pretend that I have already fully considered the input you guys have given so far.
 
arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

Led Zeppelin said:
Im sorry if this sounds dumb. I guess I just really dont have anything else to offer than what I have already said. Even though I still strongly suspect that God does exist, I would be trolling if I were to pretend that I have already fully considered the input you guys have given so far.
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Why?

Kindest regards,

James
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Led Zeppelin said:
Even though I still strongly suspect that God does exist
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On no grounds other than prior belief.

I have no idea at all whether there is a class of entities we might rightly call gods - and don't believe any other human in history does either. I wouldn't bet either way - there's simply no knowledge relevant to form a position. But until there's good reason to believe in their existence, there's no good reason to believe in their existence - the null hypothesis - and as such there's no reason to act or consider my actions from within the context of their notional existence.

When it comes to specific gods though, I am confident in saying that I know they don't exist. The Abrahamic god, for example, I would happily contend that it is wholly made up, and its ontology is so poorly wrought that it shouldn't convince a child to believe in it. That claim to knowledge is based upon a raft of different observations regarding claims Christians make, the contents of the Bible (and other extra-biblical scripture), historical events, and a slew of other minor circumstantial points. There is no conceivable way that anyone could ever hope to convince me that Yahweh is anything other than a Bronze Age cartoon character.
 
arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

Sparhafoc said:
On no grounds other than prior belief.

I have no idea at all whether there is a class of entities we might rightly call gods - and don't believe any other human in history does either. I wouldn't bet either way - there's simply no knowledge relevant to form a position. But until there's good reason to believe in their existence, there's no good reason to believe in their existence - the null hypothesis - and as such there's no reason to act or consider my actions from within the context of their notional existence.

When it comes to specific gods though, I am confident in saying that I know they don't exist. The Abrahamic god, for example, I would happily contend that it is wholly made up, and its ontology is so poorly wrought that it shouldn't convince a child to believe in it. That claim to knowledge is based upon a raft of different observations regarding claims Christians make, the contents of the Bible (and other extra-biblical scripture), historical events, and a slew of other minor circumstantial points. There is no conceivable way that anyone could ever hope to convince me that Yahweh is anything other than a Bronze Age cartoon character.
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I'd agree, and go further.

Mythic (religious) gods don't exist.

People create cultures, and religions are part of the tapestry of cultures. Deities are central to the vast majority of religions.

Rather than god(s) creating Man, Man created gods.

Kindest regards,

James
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
And of course it's time for Xenophanes

Ethiops say that their gods are snub–nosed and black
Thracians that theirs are pale and red-haired.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands
and could paint or sculpt like men,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle,
each would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.
Click to expand...
 
arg-fallbackName="Desertphile"/>
Led Zeppelin said:
Maybe it's better to use this thread to continue a discussion that got off topic in Prophetic Failures thread. ?
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The question is:

Q: "Do non physical things exist?"

The answer is:

A: NULL.

The "question" is illogical, thus it cannot be answered.
 
arg-fallbackName="Desertphile"/>
Sparhafoc said:
Well, my suggestion would be to actually look into the field in depth.

You can look at what various philosophers have said over the last few hundred years to see the discussion we've had with ourselves about these ideas.

Then you can look into the findings of modern neuroscience and see whether the notions of all these clever chaps and chapsesses from the past, who formulated their ideas in an environment absent empirical evidence, stood up to rigorous scrutiny and testing.
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Indeed. Philosophers are allowed to be ambiguous in their musings, ergo that is the only venue where "non-physical things" can fit. Science has nothing to say about questions that can only have the answer of "Null."

The issue is, what does it matter if somethings called "non-physical" exist or not? If there is a non-physical tomato plant, for one example, it may as well not exist from the view of every thing that exists (such as humans), as they cannot interact with the real universe. They cannot be known to exist, nor can they be known to exist: the answer to the question is "Null."
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Desertphile said:
Indeed. Philosophers are allowed to be ambiguous in their musings, ergo that is the only venue where "non-physical things" can fit.
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Not sure I agree entirely with that. Navel-gazers are less-than motivated to rigour, but what most people think of as philosophy isn't really philosophy. Knowing what other people in the past have said isn't philosophy, it's accounting. We record what the philosophers of the past have said not because their conclusions were correct (to a first approximation, they were uniformly incorrect, in fact), but because of what they taught us about thinking, about how to identify the failures of our presuppositions and, most importantly, what they taught us about how to ask the right kinds of question.

Semantics is one of the most important disciplines in thought, and it's central to all philosophy, science and mathematics included, as a simple matter of logic. Properly, philosophy is the entire reason that rigour in science and mathematics exists. We can't talk intelligently about any thing until we've defined it.

Which is, of course, the central reason that there's never been a single phoneme of intelligent discussion about God.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Brain's fizzing now. Thinking on.

The notion of 'physical' is a source of a lot of contention. To a physics nerd like me, the word has a specific meaning but, as I've been at pains over decades to point out, words don't have intrinsic meaning. They're models. Drawings of models, really. To me, something physical is something that impacts the energy-momentum four-vector. It's entirely devoid of ambiguity.

Are there things in 'existence' (weasel-term alert) that do not impact the energy-momentum four-vector? Off the top of my head, the only candidate I can think of is virtual particles, and even that would be a matter of scale and possibly coarse-graining effects. Indeed, we know that virtual particles can impact the energy-momentum four-vector, because that's the precise result of the Casimir experiment.

Beyond that? Dunno. The real question, to move away from null space and into irrelevance, is this: Who cares? Can these non-physical things have any effect on the universe? If they can, they can impact the energy-momentum four-vector, which results in inconsistency, because that would make them physical. If they can't, they're functionally equivalent to non-existent and we can all get happily about our day without concerning ourselves further.

I think that pretty much exhausts the options.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Knowing what people have done in the past is history, but that's also accounting. Philosophy is a journey. Too many treat it as a destination.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
@Led Zeppelin Are you up for a one-on-one? Just a simple discussion about beliefs, knowledge, thoughts, logic, that sort of thing? If it would help, I'm sure the brilliant staff could make it private, though I'd always rather keep it an open discussion as long as interjections weren't screeds.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. I promise I'll be gentle.

Sorry, got all creepy then. Seriously, though. I'd really love to explore what you think and why, and I'm happy to share what I think and why, and it might help us both. You might easily draw things out of me that I wouldn't otherwise think about or give voice to, and that's valuable to me as a writer who writes about how we think about things.

You seem honest, and genuinely curious, if slightly blinkered, which is to be expected. I'm not interested in shedding you of your beliefs, only in exploring them to see if we can tease out the why of things. I promise in return to give of myself. I'm reputed to be a pretty good teacher with a breadth of knowledge. I have a reputation for being merciless, but I've mellowed, and have little appetite for conflict. Besides, I always, always reserved that for the dangerous ones. I also have a solid reputation for being a learner, and I've never encountered anybody I didn't learn something from.

It might be an interesting experiment for both of us.
 
arg-fallbackName="Led Zeppelin"/>
hackenslash said:
@Led Zeppelin Are you up for a one-on-one? Just a simple discussion about beliefs, knowledge, thoughts, logic, that sort of thing? If it would help, I'm sure the brilliant staff could make it private, though I'd always rather keep it an open discussion as long as interjections weren't screeds.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. I promise I'll be gentle.

Sorry, got all creepy then. Seriously, though. I'd really love to explore what you think and why, and I'm happy to share what I think and why, and it might help us both. You might easily draw things out of me that I wouldn't otherwise think about or give voice to, and that's valuable to me as a writer who writes about how we think about things.

You seem honest, and genuinely curious, if slightly blinkered, which is to be expected. I'm not interested in shedding you of your beliefs, only in exploring them to see if we can tease out the why of things. I promise in return to give of myself. I'm reputed to be a pretty good teacher with a breadth of knowledge. I have a reputation for being merciless, but I've mellowed, and have little appetite for conflict. Besides, I always, always reserved that for the dangerous ones. I also have a solid reputation for being a learner, and I've never encountered anybody I didn't learn something from.

It might be an interesting experiment for both of us.
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Of course. I would be glad to. I just hope you are not expecting much from me. :D
 
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arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 42253"/>
@hackenslash Say, would it be enough to be able to manipulate vectors at your leisure to be basically onmipotent? I mean .. I cant come up with anything you couldnt do, if you had that ability.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
No, omnipotence is self-refuting. There are several things I can trivially do that would be impossible for an omnipotent entity, which shoots the whole notion in the foot. It can't have 'all power' if there's a power I (and you) possess that it cannot.

I can construct a pile of bricks too heavy for me to lift. Could an omnipotent entity do that? There's nothing particularly taxing about the act. For me, it used to be about 12 to fifteen bricks, considerably less now that my spine doesn't want to play nice.

The usual apologetic attempt to circumvent this is to suggest that a deity could choose not to be able to lift it. I hope I don't have to explain why that bullshit won't fly.
 
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